


Steppes Through History: Andromache's Backstory

by Violsva



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Ancient Greece, Ancient History, Backstory, Central Eurasia, How the Band Got Together, Indo-Europeans, Meta, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:00:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/pseuds/Violsva
Summary: Speculation on Andromache's possible backstory, timeline, and travels, based on ancient history and prehistory and what I think would be cool.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 5
Kudos: 48
Collections: The Old Guard Resources





	Steppes Through History: Andromache's Backstory

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [on Dreamwidth](https://violsva.dreamwidth.org/130746.html).

Firstly, this is not about Amazon culture, sorry. The Greek idea of Amazons is partially based on the fact that their contemporaries in Scythia (north of the Black Sea) did in fact have female warriors (lots of [kurgans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan) contemporary with classical Athens have female burials with weapons), and partially the standard misogynist ideas that strong women hate men and besides no normal man would want to live with them anyway, and partially about how imaginary societies that are the opposite of your own are fascinating.

But the comic apparently (I have not finished reading them yet) says she's over 6000 years old.* In which case she would not technically be a Scythian, though she may have hung out with them for a while. If she's 6000 years old I don't know why she's calling herself Andromache and not, I don't know, [WiHrogʷʰen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary). She's definitely not Greek.

However, AFAICT, while individual cultures moved around and changed, basically the Eurasian steppe was pretty consistently inhabited by various nomadic pastoralists from the domestication of the horse (c. 3500 BCE) until about ... now. They're still there. So she could very easily have spent thousands of years just riding horses and fighting and drinking koumiss.

And honestly I bet Andy spends a lot of time wishing she'd never left. This was probably the best time of her life from a mental health perspective. Generally speaking, nomadic and pastoralist societies are better places for women than agricultural ones, and I feel like in most prehistoric nomadic warrior societies the Eternal Warrior, regardless of gender, would actually have a pretty decent social role with the full support of her community. (This would be when she was worshipped as a god.)

But societies change and move around and people die and Andromache was already old and tired and eventually in the second millennium BCE she drifted west, into the Minoan/Mycenaean sphere of influence. Why Minoan? Because of the [axe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrys).

Also, around this point some Mycenaean met her and misheard or translated her name as Andromache and she went "...yeah, that sounds cool."

And at this point she probably still wouldn't have to hide her immortality, if it came up. So this would be where the Eternal Warrior got into Greek mythology.[](**)**

But. She's in the eastern Mediterranean. It's the late second millennium BCE. Torturing characters is fun.

So yeah, the [Late Bronze Age collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) happens. That's lots of fun. And Andromache gets the hell out of Dodge.

And she _could_ go back to the steppe and ride horses and fight for another few thousand years. But she's been having these dreams. For centuries, now.

So she keeps going east. And keeps going east. And there are some really annoying mountains and deserts. (This was before the Silk Road.) And eventually people start looking like they do in her dreams.

And she keeps going east, because Eurasia is really fucking big. But she does eventually meet Quynh, of course. (I need to watch the movie again and pay attention to the costumes when they meet to see if this works ... but on the other hand IIRC Andromache's costumes in the flashbacks usually date back to the Xena: Warrior Princess era.)

I was kind of divided on whether to have her go back to Greece around the classical period. Because on the one hand I do like the irony of her having a Greek name and being a Greek mythological figure and everyone thinking of her as Greek ... but she completely missed out on what most people actually think of as "ancient Greece." But on the other hand (μεν... δε...) I really want her to have heard[](***)*** [Herodotus 1.30-33](https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/hh1030.htm). Also, there's Lykon.

So Quynh and Andy go back west, slowly and with lots of making out on the way.

So Λύκων is a perfectly ordinary Greek name. And there were Hellenized Africans starting around 300 BCE. So (assuming, of course, that that's the name he was born with) he could be born pretty much any time after that (the Byzantine Empire kept speaking Greek and having black citizens until the Ottomans took over), and they could meet him any time starting twenty-some years after _that_. (My god Micheal Ward looks young.) Probably a lot more than twenty years, obviously, given logistics. The comic says "when Alexander conquered Judea", and that they met up really quickly after his death, so 333 BCE there. (And it would still be totally possible to have an African with a Greek name then or before that, just that after 300 BCE it would be _normal_. In Ptolemaic Egypt and then the Roman Empire, anyway.)

Joe and Nicky, of course, die in 1099. We don't know when they meet up with Andromache. I got the impression that they knew Quynh, but they aren't around in the witch trials scenes.[](****)****

In the comics Lykon died in Italy during the Renaissance. That doesn't _look_ like what was going on in the movie, but it's hard to tell. Quynh and Andromache are present for it, but apparently not Joe and Nicky. We don't know if they knew him at all.

I suspect the tight-knit group we see in the movie might have really only gotten settled after Quynh drowned; before that they might well have split up into groups of two or three occasionally, made an appointment for fifty years in the future, and gone off to do different things. They might not have even needed the appointment; they might not have been avoiding attention so hard then, in which case they were all the kind of people you'd hear stories about and be able to find again. But after Quynh's drowning there were only the three of them together for three hundred years.

**Author's Note:**

> *Personally I think she really doesn't know exactly how old she is. There's been a dozen or so changes of calendar; how/why would she keep track? The only way to tell would be to carbon date her.
> 
> Which brings up the interesting question of whether carbon dating would work on her. Technically it's based on the decay of carbon-14 after an organism's death, so ... it depends on exactly how the immortals' deaths work.
> 
> ...She is definitely still exchanging carbon with her environment, though. So probably not. (return to text)
> 
> **That is, in the universe of the story. There is no Andromache the Eternal Warrior in our world's Greek mythology. Andromache the Scythian is mentioned like twice as the name of an Amazon, and immortality never comes up. The play we saw the cover of on Copley's wall is actually about Andromache the wife of Hector. Greg Rucka made her up. Which is fine! (return to text)
> 
> ***The way most contemporary people were exposed to ancient Greek literature was through public oral performance. (return to text)
> 
> ****I would be more annoyed about the witch trials being "five hundred years" ago, because the period with the most witch trials was actually the 17th century, except that they specifically said Andy and Quynh were rescuing _heretics_ during the witch trials, and Europe persecuted heretics off and on for centuries. So that checks out.
> 
> I want it to be in England, so Andy can complain that _every damn time_ they go to England someone tries to lock them up, but it probably wasn't. **Edit 8/21:** Okay, it actually says England in the film, I missed that. Pre 1520ish, so Catholic England. Research time. (return to text)
> 
> \---------------
> 
> It also occurs to me that I could link here to a couple posts I made on classical Athens eight years ago: [Cultural Précis](https://violsva.dreamwidth.org/943.html) and [the Oresteia](https://violsva.dreamwidth.org/1445.html) (warnings for mythology-typical violence).


End file.
